About Yichun Television

Yichun Television

Overview

Yichun Television is the prefecture-level television station of Yichun in northeastern Heilongjiang province, China — the forest city in the Lesser Khingan range, not to be confused with the city of the same name in Jiangxi province. It is operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now part of the Yichun converged media centre, and its flagship channel broadcasts local news and cultural programming in Mandarin for the prefecture's districts and counties.

Every prefecture station in China is shaped by its territory, and Yichun's territory is forest. The station serves one of the most heavily wooded prefectures in the country, a city created by the timber industry and now reinventing itself around ecology and tourism. Its programming — news from scattered forestry towns, features on the primeval pine forest, coverage of the long transition from logging to conservation — reflects that singular setting.

The forest capital

Yichun lies in the hinterland of the Lesser Khingan Mountains in north-central Heilongjiang. More than 80 per cent of its territory is low mountain and hill country, and its forest coverage rate is around 83 to 84 per cent — among the highest of any Chinese city. It is known across China as the "Forest Capital" and the "Hometown of Red Pine", holding some four million hectares of forest, including Asia's largest and best-preserved primeval Korean pine forest.

The prefecture is a chain of forestry settlements strung along river valleys — districts and counties such as Wuying (now part of Fenglin County), Tangwanghe, Jiayin and Tieli — rather than a single compact city. Distances are long, winters severe, and communities small and dispersed. For Yichun Television, that settlement pattern is fundamental: broadcast and now digital distribution are how a scattered forest population shares a common civic life.

From timber hub to ecological city

Yichun grew up as a timber city. Its forests of Korean pine, spruce, fir and birch supplied construction timber to the young People's Republic for decades, and its state forestry bureaus and farms structured the prefecture's economy and society. The Fenglin Nature Reserve, established provincially in 1958 and made a national reserve in 1988 before joining UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere network in 1997, protected 18,400 hectares of virgin Korean pine forest even at the height of the logging era.

The turning point came as old-growth resources dwindled and national policy shifted to protection: commercial logging in the region's natural forests was wound down, and Yichun began its transition to an eco-tourism and forest-products economy. The human story of that transition — forestry workers changing trades, towns finding new purposes — has been the defining local narrative of the past two decades, and it runs through the station's news and documentary output.

Channels and services

Yichun Television's flagship channel is a general service in Mandarin carrying the prefecture's main news bulletins, together with cultural, tourism and livelihood programming. In a prefecture of dispersed settlements, transmission across the mountain valleys and distribution through cable and digital platforms are essential parts of the service, and the converged media centre now republishes the station's reporting for mobile audiences throughout Yichun.

As the municipal tier of broadcasting, the station complements Heilongjiang Television's provincial coverage and CCTV's national output with the one thing neither can supply: continuous attention to the forest districts themselves — their schools, clinics, timber-turned-tourism enterprises and village affairs.

News from the forest districts

The station's news operation covers a prefecture where the lead stories are often environmental. Forest fire prevention in the dry seasons, the state of the protected pine forests, wildlife returning to the Lesser Khingan — including Siberian tigers, black bears and roe deer — and the enforcement of the logging ban are staples of its reporting. Municipal policy, infrastructure across the mountain districts, and the severe-weather warnings that matter in a region of long, cold winters complete the core agenda.

Livelihood coverage has a distinctive local flavour: the conversion of forestry employment, pensions and services in former logging settlements, and the development of under-forest industries such as mushrooms, blueberries and medicinal plants that now support many households. These are stories only a local station tells in full.

An economy under the canopy

Yichun's new economy is built on the forest it no longer cuts. Eco-tourism is the flagship: Wuying National Forest Park protects 141.41 square kilometres of virgin Korean pine, with trees hundreds of years old; Tangwanghe's national park is known for its granite stone forest and river scenery; and Jiayin County, on the Heilongjiang River, is known for dinosaur fossils — China's first dinosaur fossil was unearthed in the prefecture — and border-river tourism. The station's cameras are the main vehicle through which these attractions are presented to provincial and national audiences.

Forest food and health products form the second pillar: pine nuts, fungi, berries, honey and herbal products from the Lesser Khingan are marketed across China, and the station's economic programming follows the brands, cooperatives and e-commerce channels carrying them. Coverage of Lindu Airport and the road and rail links binding the forest districts together rounds out the development agenda.

Culture of the pines

Korean pine culture is Yichun's identity. The Fenglin reserve's ancient pines — some with trunks 1.4 metres across and heights of 37 metres — and the belief that the great majority of China's Korean pines grow in Yichun give the prefecture a totemic tree. Cultural programming explores the folklore, forestry heritage and conservation ethics attached to the forest, as well as the material culture of the logging era now passing into memory.

Seasonal features follow the forest year: spring green-up, summer cool — Yichun markets itself as a summer retreat with average temperatures around 22 degrees Celsius — the celebrated autumn colours of Wuhua Mountain, and the deep snows of winter. For the station, the forest is not a backdrop but the main subject, and its cultural output serves both local pride and the tourism economy.

The converged media centre era

Yichun Television operates within the national converged media centre reform, under which city and county broadcasters have merged their radio, television and new-media operations into single centres since the late 2010s. For a prefecture of small, scattered communities, the model has practical force: one newsroom in the city can serve broadcast viewers and phone users in every forest district at once.

Convergence also suits Yichun's tourism mission. The short videos and livestreams produced by the media centre — pine forests in autumn colour, winter snow scenes, dinosaur and river attractions — are precisely the content through which Chinese travellers now choose destinations, and the station's accumulated footage of the Lesser Khingan gives it a head start in that competition.

Audience and community role

Yichun's audience is a forest population: former loggers and their families, rangers and reserve staff, tourism and forest-product workers, and the residents of small towns separated by long mountain roads. Local television knits that population together, carrying municipal notices, school and health information, fire and weather warnings, and shared coverage of the prefecture's festivals and honours.

The station also performs a representative role, showing the forest districts to themselves. In communities whose work is rarely visible on national screens, seeing the pine reserves, the fossil sites and the river towns treated as subjects of serious television is a form of recognition the provincial and national media seldom provide.

Significance and outlook

Yichun Television documents one of China's clearest ecological transitions: a city built to cut down a forest learning to prosper by keeping it standing. Its archive and its daily output together form the visual record of that change, from the last logging years to the era of national parks and forest tourism.

The station's prospects follow the city's. If Yichun's bet on ecology — tourism, forest foods, wellness and conservation — continues to pay off, its broadcaster will have a growing story to tell and new audiences to reach through the converged centre's platforms. Either way, its remit is fixed by geography: to serve the people of the Lesser Khingan forest, in Mandarin, from inside the trees.